Quotes About Influence

Because he did not have time to read every new book in his field, the great Polish anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski used a simple and efficient method of deciding which ones were worth his attention: Upon receiving a new book, he immediately checked the index to see if his name was cited, and how often. The more "Malinowski" the more compelling the book. No "Malinowski," and he doubted the subject of the book was anthropology at all.

How often does it occur that information provided you on morning radio or television, or in the morning newspaper, causes you to alter your plans for the day, or to take some action you would not otherwise have taken, or provides insight into some problem you are required to solve?

Marx understood well that the press was not merely a machine but a structure for discourse, which both rules out and insists upon certain kinds of content and, inevitably, a certain kind of audience.

Many decisions about the form and content of news programs are made on the basis of information about the viewer, the purpose of which is to keep the viewers watching so that they will be exposed to the commercials

As I write, the President of the United States is a former Hollywood movie actor.

In the American Technopoly, public opinion is a yes or no answer to an unexamined question.

Television, in other words, is transforming our culture into one vast arena for show business. It is entirely possible, of course, that in the end we shall find that delightful, and decide we like it just fine. That is exactly what Aldous Huxley feared was coming, fifty years ago.

I am constantly amazed at how obediently people accept explanations that begin with the words "The computer shows …" or "The computer has determined …" It is Technopoly's equivalent of the sentence "It is God's will," and the effect is roughly the same.

How people think about time and space, and about things and processes, will be greatly influenced by the grammatical features of their language.

If the press was, as David Riesman called it, "the gunpowder of the mind," the computer, in its capacity to smooth over unsatisfactory institutions and ideas, is the talcum powder of the mind.

As a television show, and a good one, "Sesame Street" does not encourage children to love school or anything about school. It encourages them to love television.

La aparición en la arena política del asesor de imagen y el simultáneo declive del redactor de discursos atestiguan el hecho de que la televisión demanda un contenido que difiere del exigido por los otros medios. No se puede hacer filosofía política en televisión porque su forma conspira contra el contenido.

Children are the living messages we send to a time we will not see. ~Neil Postman, The Disappearance of Childhood (introduction), 1982

Voting, we might even say, is the next to last refuge of the politically impotent.

I am particularly fond of John Lindsay's suggestion that political commercials be banned from television as we now ban cigarette and liquor commercials.

The last refuge is, of course, giving your opinion to a pollster, who will get a version of it through a desiccated question, and then will submerge it in a Niagara of similar opinions, and convert them into—what else?—another piece of news. Thus, we have here a great loop of impotence: The news elicits from you a variety of opinions about which you can do nothing except to offer them as more news, about which you can do nothing.

Those who would be gods refashion themselves into images the viewers would have them be.

to whom will the technology give greater power and freedom? And whose power and freedom will be reduced by it?

Television is at its most trivial and, therefore, most dangerous when its aspirations are high, when it presents itself as a carrier of important cultural conversations.

new technologies compete with old ones—for time, for attention, for money, for prestige, but mostly for dominance of their world-view.

embedded in every tool is an ideological bias, a predisposition to construct the world as one thing rather than another, to value one thing over another, to amplify one sense or skill or attitude more loudly than another.

Surrounding every technology are institutions whose organization—not to mention their reason for being—reflects the world-view promoted by the technology.

New technologies alter the structure of our interests: the things we think about. They alter the character of our symbols: the things we think with. And they alter the nature of community: the arena in which thoughts develop.

We know enough about language to understand that variations in the structures of languages will result in variations in what may be called "world view." How people think about time and space, and about things and processes, will be greatly influenced by the grammatical features of their language.